181–190 of 286 posts
All the known techniques for NLP and NLU are mediocre. From Apples perspective, it makes a lot of sense to not invest so much money for such little gain. Google Assistant is supposedly better, but I don’t notice/care. Google/Amazon pour a lot of money into their personal assistant tech, but the end result is hardly noticeable or useful.
I’m able to consistently perform:
- Reminders with or without location tags “add eggs to grocery list” “remind me to check oil when I get home”
- Calendar events “create event about mr Smith tomorrow 2pm” “create meeting with bob March 12 noon” (“with” spawns an invite, I use “about”) “move my 2pm meeting to 4pm” “what’s going on tomorrow”
- weather “what’s the weather like this week” “what’s it going to be like in Manhattan beach on Saturday”
- Calls, by name, number or direct to speaker “call my brother” “call 213-555-1212” “call my dad on speakerphone”
- FaceTime “FaceTime my mom”
- Email “Email my brother” Subject? “take out” Message? “Grab me a burger” ready to send? “Yes”
- Messages, one liner or conversationally “tell my brother I’m running late” ready? “Go” or “message my sister” message? “Call me.” Ready to send it? “Affirmative”
- Math “what’s 128 times 10 million?” “What’s 10 days from next Tuesday?”
- Time “what time is it?” “What time is it in Florida?”
- Location “where is my sister?”
- Automation “living room lights blue” “goodnight”
- Dictation “blah period new line I swear exclamation mark new paragraph furthermore comma open parentheses really close parentheses all caps cats are all caps really all caps really cool question mark” I frequently do complicated technical dictation using Siri, it’s not a problem in fact this particular sentence was composed entirely with Siri with zero post correction.
All of these work consistently and reliably, for me, using either PTT style hold and speak, long-press and wait for the beep, or “Hey Siri” invocation.
Seriously, I use all of this all day every day on an old iPhone, I’m not blind but if I was I’d consider it reliable enough for those purposes.
I don’t do a lot of location, navigation, or searches with Siri because generally, performance is not optimal and you’re not able to focus the intent domain clearly enough with consistent verbiage.
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Siri may have stalled now but it definitely wasn’t a botched launch. And Apple maps may not work great in all cases but it did succeed in forcing Google to provide decent maps on iOS. Before Apple Maps the vector maps were an Android exclusive.
Apple Maps is like Bing: almost as good as the #1 service, but almost is not enough to make anyone care. Apple Maps is remarkably good today, doing nearly all of the important things well. Here in Australia, it's on par with Google Maps for driving (slightly worse for novel route planning, slightly better for guidance) and when travelling to major world cities I've found Apple Maps is frequently better than Google Ma…
Wow so much Siri bashing in here. I’m a daily driver and I suppose an outlier working on a now aging 6S+ but Siri has been way reliable and generally fast outside of what I’d call “harsh” environments like outside on a busy street or with poor reception. I’m able to consistently perform: - Reminders with or without location tags “add eggs to grocery list” “remind me to check oil when I get home” - Calendar events “cr…
How does this one work? Is it just an address lookup, or does it support some location sharing like Google maps?
Wow so much Siri bashing in here. I’m a daily driver and I suppose an outlier working on a now aging 6S+ but Siri has been way reliable and generally fast outside of what I’d call “harsh” environments like outside on a busy street or with poor reception. I’m able to consistently perform: - Reminders with or without location tags “add eggs to grocery list” “remind me to check oil when I get home” - Calendar events “cr…
> Location “where is my sister?” How does this one work? Is it just an address lookup, or does it support some location sharing like Google maps?
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Walt Mossberg has a funny "series" on his Twitter where he screencaps all the blatent failures he has with Siri. Many times, he or a follower will attach a screenshot of Assistant completing the action. It's not scientific by any means, but it's fun to go through and provides some concrete examples. His biggest issue seems to be that Siri is unreliable - there are queries that work, but only sometimes, and that makes…
If Apple engineers who work on Siri were required to do all of their corporate communication with Siri exclusively, Siri would rule inside a year. That is assuming they were trusted to work on it instead of report to status meetings, or meetings to their dotted line manager, etc. Apple was built around Steve. It’s going to take a while.
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Obligatory question is why? What usefullness or functionality made that much of a difference to him?
Cant speak for the other person, but as someone who's used iPhones exclusively since the original, Siri makes mistakes with sufficient frequency that it's subjectively just bad. I can't quantify what percentage of requests fail to be understood correctly, but it's sufficiently high that the frequency is annoying. It's even worse when using the Apple Watch (Series 3). Unexpectedly, this can sometimes be a positive too…
But siri always interprets "Fifty" as "Fifteen". Pretty much every single time, it always makes the same mistake, no matter how clearly or slowly I try to pronounce it. I have to say "Hey Siri, set a timer for five zero minutes" to get it to pick it up accurately.
Siri is very dumb. I use for for reminders and alarms. I speak fr-ca as opposed to fr-fr, and some conversations go like this: Siri, call X on cell Sorry, can’t call X Siri, call X on mobile Calling X on cell In fr-ca, we talk about cell phones. In the contact app, the mobile phone is registered as cell phone, but in fr-fr, they use mobile. I also sometimes have this conversation: Siri, rappelle-moi de mettre des mou…
Seeing that Alexa only works in English and German ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... ) Siri is still better than Alexa for most of the world....